Marriage and Marianne
Mel Kenyon has been a professional motorsports racer for almost fifty years. He was the third place finisher in the Indianpolis 500 in 1968 and qualified for the world's most famous auto race seven other times --all of this after surviving a horrific crash that covered 40% of his body with third-degree burns and cost him all the fingers on his left hand. Later in his life, he switched formats and won the United States Auto Racing society short-track (midget) racing championship seven times. At age 71, he's still racing. But the reason my pastor told us Mel Kenyon's story was not because of his achievements on the racetrack, or even the Christian faith that was always a part of his life. It was about his wife Marianne.
They had met at a skating rink in the early sixties, near the beginning of his racing career. They fell in love. They were married and shared a life and career together. And then, in 1991, a freak accident on a bicycle left Marianne with completely crippling brain damage. She could no longer talk, no longer walk, no longer move her limbs. Virtually every single possible body function she could no longer do herself. Marianne might still be breathing, but for all intensive purposes, the woman that Mel loved was forever gone.
I've had some experience helping patients like Marianne on a daily basis during summer volunteer service in Tokyo high school summers years ago. Beyond the obvious challenges of feeding and bathing someone who can't move, or handling bathroom issues, there's those things you really never consider. Like the fact that if you stay in one position too long, you get bleeding, painful bed sores --which the patient can't even tell you about. Or the constant slobber of drool that dribbles everywhere since the patient can't swallow or wipe themselves. A patient with a high cervical fracture is a patient that requires a tremendous amount of near-constant effort. But Mel never once felt it was a burden, single-handedly caring for Marianne every day and every night for the next eight years until she finally slipped away.
Sometimes, between the bathing and the feeding and the caring for sores and the moving and everything else, Mel would take Marianne out in her wheelchair, to the skating rink where they had first fallen in love. And there, out on the floor, they would go around and around, he pushing her, they going around together, as they first did, years before.
In my own view, sex is merely an action and a choice, like countless others we make in our lives. Sometimes sex is a gift and sometimes it is a curse; sometimes a thing of joy and somtimes a thing of horror; sometimes something remembered with warm fondness and sometimes with most bitter regret. Sometimes sex is the beginning of something wonderful. Sometimes sex is the beginning of a trap that can last a lifetime. Sometimes sex can even kill. Sometimes sex is good. Sometimes sex is bad. Sometimes it's both at the exact same time. In different hands, under different circumstances, sex is different things. But love is not sex, and sex is not love.
I often think the word "love" gets overused and diluted, when it really has a very specific meaning. I think there's a reason why we have separate words for "infatuation", for "crush", for "lust", and a hundred related concepts. Ultimately, I think perhaps the problem is that love gets defined as a moment or a feeling when what love really is about is a promise and a process and a thing one constantly nutures and protects and grows...
To me, what love *is* is about committment. Love is about self-sacrifice. Love is about loyalty, about generosity, about duty and about respect. Love is about trust never betrayed, mistakes always forgiven, about a choice --a *choice*-- to remain steadfast for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death or the end of the world. When you have no doubt that you could call someone on the phone or bang on their door at 3 AM and get help no matter what; when the fondest dream of your heart is for that someone else to find true happiness --no matter where or who that happiness might be with; when the price you are willing to pay on someone else's behalf is not burden but privelege and honor: I think *that* is love.
The word "love" is a word of great power and import. It is a promise and a contract made every day for years and decades and lifetimes, all the more powerful because it is a responsibility and duty chosen of free will. Carried out, it is a noble thing. It is a beautiful thing. It is the foundation of all good things in life and what makes friendships and marriages and relationships and families the joys they can be. It is, above all things, a thing that actually exists in our world because there are people who have chosen to do their best to make it so, every day that they can.
And it is a thing that I believe exists whether you are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or like me, choose not to currently make sex in any form a part of your own personal life.
Love is not sex, and sex is not love. Sex is one kind of thing, and love is another. And if two people are committed to choose to trust each other completely and utterly with their lives, their fortunes, and their futures --if two people are in love in the fullest meaning of the word as I have come to believe it means-- then there is no reason mortal law should care who the two consenting, responsible adults in question are in its assignment of duties, responsibilities, burdens and priveleges. No reason why mortal law should care what race, what nationality, what creed, what profession; what hair color or eye color or height or weight or color. And no reason why mortal law should care what kind of sex they have --or if they have any kind of sex at all. I am no less capable of true love simply because I choose not to have sex before marriage. And the same applies, I think, to every other sexual choice between adults capable of mutual consent and mutual committment that might exist.
As a committed Christian, I believe there is an important, fundamental truth, regarding the Christian citizen's role in a diverse democracy, captured in Jesus Christ's admonition to leave to Ceasar what was Ceasar's, and leave to our God what is His. Most observers draw a specific line between the civil exercise of marriage and the religious sacraments by the same name, for very good reason. I have no qualms whatsoever about thinking that the attempts to restrict the legal definition of the rights accorded under civil marriage based on what kind of sex you choose to have --if any-- is a profoundly dumb-ass, there-ain't-enough-expletives-in-English,Chinese,and-Japanese idea that ought to be opposed. And that is why I oppose the various political efforts to do so.
And as a committed Christian, I think there is a even more important and fundamental truth about what Christians are supposed to aspire to be. It is something that I have tried to touch on before in far greater detail, in entries like Under the Flowering Trees and Looking for a Miracle. It is something that touches upon the white-hot anger I have torwards politicians who call themselves Christians and yet declare that, amidst the vast numbers of poor, sick and hungry in the richest majority-Christian nation ever to exist under heaven, that somehow the narrow civil and legal definition of marriage should be our highest priority; an anger torwrds such hypocrites that Christ himself and the apostles who followed him as authors spent literally thousands of words of the New Testament in no-holds-barred condemnation. There are, to me, important issues about what Christianity means with regards to things like my personal choices about sex, just as there are important issues about what my faith means with regards to my purpose in this world and what I am supposed to try to do. All subjects, perhaps, for another day and another time, of which I now have precious little of. But most importantly, I believe that while love is not unique by any means to Christianity, Christianity, and the Christian life, is fundamentally supposed to be about this thing we call love. This thing we call "true love", the love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love is not sex. Marriage is not sex. Marriage and love is about an elderly race-car driver gently pushing his forever-silent, wheelchair-bound wife around the rink so full of memories, year after silent year. That's the kind of husband, friend, and Christian I hope I can be strong enough to be.
And we come back to the very beginning. At the bottom line, I think: marriage is love.